James Fodor

speaker

3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 164: Gauge Theory and the Higgs Boson · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

We only measure phase differences, but there's two phases in in the uh in the formalism.

Uh we need to reduce the degrees of freedom by one, and so that field there is what we perform the transformation on when we we do the local the local phase invariance.

So one extra internal degree of freedom means one gauge field.

That corresponds.

corresponds to transformations of quite a simple group.

It's called the unitary group of dimension one, or U1.

The U here for unitary, without getting into too much detail, is basically just referring to the fact that probability has to be conserved.

So particles can be created or destroyed, but you have to have a conservation of things like momentum and other quantum numbers.

So uh loosely that's where unitary is referring to.

I I don't want to get too much into detail of that, but the U stands for unitary.

Okay, so electromagnetism is fairly simple.

What about the weak nuclear force?

Well, the weak nuclear force is a bit more complicated because instead of there being only one extra degree of freedom, there's actually three extra degrees of freedom that we have.

And the reason that for the reason for this is because the weak nuclear force describes not just a single type of particle like electrons or or quarks, but it describes what are called weak doublets.

And this just means a pair of particles that kind of go together in the interactions.

I'll explain a little bit what I mean by that.

So what are the weak doublets exactly?

Well, we've actually already met them.

So remember I said that there's this distinction between quarks and leptons, and there's three generations of matter, but within a generation, both of the leptons form a weak doublet.

So the electron and the electron neutrino form a weak doublet.

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